Belinda Bauer - Darkside

Jonas had not been specific about the wording of the first two notes. He hadn’t wanted to say the word ‘crybaby’, so had been fuzzy about the first note too, for the sake of appearing consistent, even if it was only consistently stupid. But Marvel’s words had snapped everything back into sharp relief.

Call yourself a policeman .

Why had he said it? How did he know?

As sleet started to spit in Jonas’s face, his mind turned slow, gravity-free circles around Marvel, looking at him from new angles and with fresh eyes.

Marvel had never liked him. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d managed to piss the man off right from the start of this investigation.

Now he began to wonder why.

Even from his doorstep viewpoint, Jonas had the feeling that Marvel had been lost on the case, that he’d employed a scattergun approach to suspects, that there was no real sense of focus in his investigation.

The way he’d over-reacted to finding Jonas on the doorstep of Margaret Priddy’s told of a man who was floundering and insecure, and Jonas had thought he had smelled booze on the man’s breath. Or maybe just in his sweat.

When the alleged vomit had disappeared, Marvel had told him to do his job – and the way he’d said it, ‘crybaby’ was only a whisper away.

And now he’d repeated the first note almost word for word.

Had he seen it?

Had he written it?

It sounded stupid, even inside the privacy of his own head, but did Marvel have some kind of connection with the killer?

Jonas shuddered at the thought. He had Reynolds’s card still in his breast pocket. Would Reynolds be discreet if Jonas voiced his fears to him? He doubted it. Jonas had the impression that Reynolds did not like Marvel that much, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d take sides against him.

He looked up into the sleet to see that he was almost at his gate.

He needed to speak to Lucy. Lucy’s brain worked faster than his at the best of times, and right now his brain was stuffed so full, and was nonetheless so empty of solutions, that it was as if a super-massive black hole was expanding slowly within his head, ready to burst out and swallow up the whole world in compressed nothingness.

Lucy was on the living-room floor, weeping and gnarled up with pain and with an unopened bottle of pills beside her.

In an instant the black hole in Jonas’s head shrank to a pinprick and his heart exploded into his throat with fear.

He dropped to the carpet beside her and tried to gather her into his arms, but she tucked up and resisted.

Her head was hot with tears, but the rest of her was icy from being on the floor. The fire was long burned out and had turned to white ashes. Jonas got her tartan rug and wrapped it around her, then lay down behind her and wrapped his arms around that . He could keep her warm, even if he couldn’t keep her well.

‘Did you take anything, Lu?’

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No, I didn’t!’

He squeezed her into his chest. ‘I meant for the pain.’

‘If I had then it wouldn’t be hurting so much!’ she yelled at him – and started a new bout of hopeless crying.

An hour later they were in the same position but on the bed, where Lucy had allowed herself to be carried.

The silence was complete – what isolation and winter had not dampered, the snow had shushed as it fell.

Jonas had given her three painkillers and the worst of it was over.

‘How do you feel?’ he whispered.

‘Better,’ she said. Better than what she did not say, but Jonas understood that, and hoped she knew that he did.

Jonas stared unblinkingly at the opposite wall of what he would always think of as his parents’ room.

‘Tell me about your night,’ she said, still with the weary trace of a sob in her voice.

She needed to forget her own. He knew that.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

How could he tell her? He felt numb. He felt detached. He didn’t know any more where lines could be drawn between past and present, good and evil, right and wrong.

‘Jonas?’

Jonas felt it all starting to rise in him. Everything underneath was coming to the surface – however much he tried to keep it down.

Tigger for Danny, Taffy for him. The slide of polished leather against his knees and the grip-and-release wonder of a whole beast held in his little-boy hands; the bunching and bumping of muscles under his backside; watching Danny fly along beside him and hoping he looked as free as his best friend did; the eager little ears, between which he’d viewed his whole world. For a happy while .

Jonas remembered.

Although he’d spent a lifetime forgetting.

He remembered the heady smell of the coarse mix and hay; the quiet sounds of hoofs brushing straw over concrete, and the velvet breath of Taffy’s muzzle touching his hair, while all the time he was held down and ordered not to cry while unspeakable things were done to him .

Unspeakable .

He shuddered against Lucy’s back.

‘Jonas?’

But Danny had seen. Danny had known. Maybe Danny had even had the same thing happen to him . He knew that must have been true, because even though they’d never spoken of it – because it was unspeakable – Danny had done something about it.

He’d burned the place down.

Now, here, twenty years later, Jonas’s head pounded and he twitched, as he remembered like a dog.

Going down the row of smouldering stables, roofs caved in and doors thrown open for the ponies to escape. Someone had done that. Someone who loved them had thought of the ponies. But the ponies had not escaped. Terrified by the flames, the ponies had screamed and died in the fire, just as Robert Springer had. Seven sad carcasses still in their boxes. Some so charred that only their legs protruded from a pile of ash, some barely damaged, killed by smoke .

Tigger was half gone but Taffy was unmarked – collapsed against the back wall of his stable, with his legs tucked under his chest, his clever little head bowed gracefully, and his soft lips pressed against the concrete, as if he were lying in a summer meadow nibbling at daisies .

The eighth carcass had already been taken away in an ambulance with a sheet over its blackened, grinning face .

The smell of death was overwhelming .

Turning to his friend through a blur of tears to find comfort in shared misery, Jonas had instead seen pale shock – and guilt .

‘Why didn’t they run away, Jonas? They should have run away!’

The ponies had died because of him. Because he was too weak to stop it.

Jonas started to shake.

‘Sweetheart. What’s wrong?’

‘Danny Marsh is dead,’ he told her bluntly.

And then – finally – he started to cry.

‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Joy Springer. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Marvel was so surprised that he sloshed Cinzano on the kitchen table. The stuff wasn’t so bad once you got a taste for it.

Joy sat on a kitchen chair, elbows on the table and her glass outstretched for a refill. The old woman’s frizzy grey bun had escaped its grips and she looked like Albert Einstein on a bad-hair day.

‘Why?’ he said – and Marvel didn’t often say that around Joy Springer. He’d soon learned in their almost nightly sessions not to use certain words. Why was high on the list, with its answering convolutions and explanations, although When was the real killer, as it allowed Joy to ramble back over what felt like the last 150 years of her life – none of it of the slightest interest to Marvel. One night she had held him hell-bound, running through the names of her friends from nursery school onwards. No stories, no descriptions, no insightful recollections or pivotal moments – just a litany of meaningless names like a bore of biblical begattings.